AMY Tan and Taras Grescoe are among the host of writers to highlight this year’s Shanghai International Literary Festival.

Over the past 14 years, the event at M on the Bund has welcomed some of the best names from the world of literature and related arts. The list includes names like Thomas Keneally, who shared his experience of the Booker Prize-winning “Schindler’s List,” bestselling Chinese-American author Amy Tan, whose novels have a touch of Shanghai, and Matt Groening, who wowed the audience with behind-the-scenes stories in creating “The Simpsons” and “Futurama.”

This year’s festival will be held from March 10 to 22. Tan is back again this year and will talk about her new book that is due to be published this fall.

There will be children’s sessions as well with wildlife photographer Jan Latta and bestselling children’s book author Sarah Brennan.

Film screening and panel talks will be held next weekend, along with the traditional fare — the erotic fiction competition.

As usual, the festival has a wide variety of topics, including the real-life parallels between medieval history and “Game of Thrones.” The talk will be delivered by Oxford Medieval literature professor Carolyne Larrington, while Beijing-based journalist Alec Ash will delve into the stories of China’s “little emperors.”

Tan, author of bestsellers like “The Joy Luck Club,” “The Kitchen God’s Wife” and “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” will discuss her new book “Where the Past Begins” that will be released in October.

Shanghai is no stranger to Tan, whose maternal grandmother was from this city. She has written about lives in old Shanghai in many of her novels, including “The Valley of Amazements” (2013).

In 2004, Tan published “The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life,” a collection of essays throughout her literary career that delves into her private stories that inspired her haunting books, and her recurring theme exploring the difficult and complicated relationship between mother and daughter.

“Where the Past Begins” is expected to reveal more about imagination, the act of writing, and how she retrieves long-forgotten emotional memories into fictional stories.

Tan will also have a writers’ conversation with Duncan Clark, whose biography on Alibaba tycoon “Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built” revealed many unknown facts about Ma and grabbed the eyes of both Chinese and foreign readers.

Clark founded his consultancy firm in Beijing in 1994 and served as an advisor to many Chinese Internet entrepreneurs in their early years. He has also briefed the UK government on China’s digital economy and was awarded an O.B.E in 2013 for his services in the rapidly growing UK trade and investment in China.

Canadian author Taras Grescoe is thrilled to be back in the city he terms “grand.”

“I’m excited to be returning to Shanghai,” said Grescoe, who has done extensive research in the city for his book “Shanghai Grand.”

Grescoe is participating in the literary festival for the first time. “I discover something new every time I come here,” he said.

While modern China has many experts intrigued, the history of the country, and especially that of Shanghai, has remained a popular subject at the festival over the years.

Grescoe fell in love with the city during his first visit in 2007.

“Shanghai in the 1930s is innately romantic — and cinematic,” he said about his four years of research working on the book.

“Gangsters, poets, future revolutionaries, capitalists, living side by side, with great decadence sharing the streets with great poverty. I believe that if you want to understand China today — and thus what the world is going to be like tomorrow — you have to understand what Shanghai was like yesterday.”

In “Shanghai Grand,” Grescoe tries to understand all these through 1930s Shanghai, featuring three people particularly.

“When I came across Emily ‘Mickey’ Hahn, and her memoir ‘China to Me,’ I knew I’d discovered an excellent eyewitness to Shanghai from its days as the ‘Paris of the Orient.’ It was amazing that one of the first people she met in Shanghai was Sir Victor Sassoon, the Sephardic Jewish multi-millionaire who built the Cathay Hotel, the man who built the first ‘skyscrapers on the mud’ on the Bund and was really responsible for the city’s glamorous reputation,” he said.

One of the characters he deals with extensively is the Chinese poet Shao Xunmei, with whom Hahn had a long and passionate affair.

“This extraordinary man, who was inspired by French decadent poetry but dressed in the long robes of a scholar, welcomed her into his home and introduced her to the Chinese side of Shanghai. Too many foreigners at the time ignored the Chinese city — they visited Western nightclubs and slept in hotels on the Bund. Emily Hahn plunged into the real Shanghai, and came to love China.”

There is a lot of interest in the young generation, who seem to be almost opposite to their parents and grandparents in many ways.

Beijing-based journalist Alec Ash calls this generation — those between ages of 16 and 30 — the “little emperors, rat tribes.” An Oxford University graduate, Ash moved to Beijing in 2008 and published the book “Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China” last summer.

About the same age as the people he was writing about, Ash’s book follows the stories of six young Chinese who grew up in a country that was undergoing tremendous transformations in the last 30 years. The book explores how they are different from the previous generation, and why and how they will change the future of this country.

Shanghai-born-and-based Betty Barr is also bringing her story of Shanghai, through her late mother’s wartime diary, which she recently published as “Ruth’s Record.” Barr was interned in Lunghua Camp as a teenager in 1943-1945.

She will share her memories, and compare those with Keiko Itoh, who has written the book “My Shanghai 1942-46,” a fictionalized account of her Christian Japanese mother’s struggle to come to terms with her privileged position in the city at that wartime.

Date: March 10-22

Venue: Glam, 7/F, 20 Guangdong Rd

Admission: 40-150 yuan

Tickets are available at http://www.m-restaurantgroup.com/community/m-literary-festival.